I have always believed that the best holidays are defined not by the view from your window but by the people who interrupt it, and my recent stay at a modest little place in Koper proved this theory beyond any doubt. The journey from the UK had been one of those typically British affairs: a budget flight to Trieste, a hire car with suspiciously squeaky brakes, and a satnav that insisted on pronouncing Slovenian place names as if it were having a mild stroke. The mishap came just outside Ankaran, when I confidently turned down what I believed was a shortcut and found myself in a vineyard, nose-to-nose with a tractor driven by a man who looked as surprised as I was. I wound down my window. He wound down his. We stared at each other. "You are lost," he said, not as a question but as a gentle diagnosis. I admitted it. He laughed, a proper belly laugh, and spent ten minutes drawing me a map on the back of an envelope that had once contained seeds. I arrived at the property forty minutes later with soil on my shoes and what felt like the beginning of a proper adventure.

The apartment itself was one of those clean, straightforward Slovenian affairs, all white walls and functional furniture, with a balcony that looked out towards the Gulf of Trieste. I dumped my bags and went in search of coffee, which is how I met Zvonko. He ran the little cafe two streets away, a man in his sixties with eyebrows that seemed to operate independently of his face. I ordered in my phrasebook Slovenian. He corrected my pronunciation with the patience of a man who had corrected many tourists before me, then refused my money and made me a second espresso while he explained that he had once worked in Manchester in the 1980s. "Rain," he said, with the satisfaction of someone who had survived something. "So much rain. Here, we have sun. You will see." He said this as though issuing a challenge to the weather itself.

The weather, as it happened, obliged. The next morning I walked down to the harbour and found myself adopted by a group of elderly men playing cards on a bench. They did not ask if I wanted to watch; they simply shifted along and made space, as if I were a cousin who had finally arrived late to a family gathering. One of them, Jure, spoke enough English to translate the others' relentless teasing of each other. They had been meeting there for thirty years, he told me, through Yugoslavia and independence and EU membership and all the rest of it. "We are like these benches," another man said, in Slovenian that Jure translated with theatrical precision. "We do not move. The world moves around us." They found this hilarious. I found it rather profound, though I laughed with them to be polite.

That afternoon I met Maja at the small market near Tito Square. She sold olive oil from her family's grove outside Izola and had opinions about everything. She told me I was buying the wrong cheese, guided me to a better stall, then introduced me to the cheese seller, who turned out to be her ex-husband. They bickered about my purchase with the easy intimacy of people who had long ago decided that some arguments were worth maintaining. "He never understood business," Maja told me, loudly enough for him to hear. "She never understood cheese," he replied, handing me an extra slice of prsut with a wink. I stood between them like a child at a divorce hearing, clutching my purchases and grinning like an idiot.

By my third day I had accumulated what felt like a small village of acquaintances. There was the woman at the bakery who remembered my order and commented on my improving Slovenian with the faint praise usually reserved for toddlers. There was the fisherman who showed me how to clean squid properly, a process I performed so badly that he took over with theatrical despair. There was the young waiter who confessed, in a whisper, that he was saving to move to London, and wanted to know if it was true that British people really did queue for everything. I confirmed it. He looked both horrified and impressed.

On my final evening I found myself back at Zvonko's cafe. He poured me a glass of local refosk and asked if I had enjoyed Koper. I told him I had, though I struggled to explain why. It was not the architecture, though the Venetian influence was charming enough. It was not the sea, though the water was that particular Adriatic blue that makes you want to learn to paint. It was the sense of having stumbled into a place where people still had time for strangers, where a wrong turn in a vineyard could become a story, where a bench of card players could make you feel, however briefly, like you belonged.

Zvonko nodded as if this were obvious. "You come back," he said. It was not quite a command, but it was not quite a suggestion either. I think I probably will, if only to discover what those eyebrows have been up to in my absence.